An insurer may provide payments when claims are made in connection with an insurance policy. For example, an employee who is injured while working might receive payments associated with a workers' compensation insurance policy purchased by his or her employer. Similarly, a person involved in an automobile accident may receive a payment in connection with an automobile insurance policy. The insurer may assign a claim handler to communicate with a claimant, an employer, another insurer, and/or medical service providers to help determine the appropriate amount of payment. Note that submitted claims may involve various amounts of work by a claim handler. For example, one submitted insurance claim might be relatively straightforward while another claim involves complex determinations of liability and/or injury issues.
In one approach, a received insurance claim is assigned to a claim handler in a random or round robin manner. This, however, might lead to one claim handler having a significantly more complex workload as compared to another claim handler. Moreover, manually determining which claim handler should be assigned to each individual insurance claim can be time consuming task, especially when there are a substantial number of claims to be analyzed. For example, an insurer might receive tens of thousands of new insurance claims each year (which might represent a billion dollars of potential liability). It would therefore be desirable to provide systems and methods to facilitate the assignment of insurance claims to claim handlers, in an automated, efficient, and accurate manner.